Sunday, January 01, 2006

James Fenton on Johnson and modern biography

in the Guardian. Broadly speaking, it's a response piece to a new edition of Johnson's life of Richard Savage, edited by Richard Holmes (I'm not sure if this is available in the US or not; I've linked to the Amazon page, which gives an Oct. 31, 2005 publication date, but it's also giving the "Out of print-limited availability" message).

This HarperCollins series is fun, though; I was just reading the Defoe on Sheppard and Wild one a few months ago, though I believe that life of Jonathan Wild may have been "deattributed"--but the question of what Defoe did and didn't write is irretrievably murky....

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About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.